Performative technologies for heritage site regeneration

Abstract

Heritage sites are an important part of understanding our role in history. They have the potential to teach us important lessons, such as where we came from and subsequently, the people it has made us today. As members of a large, heritage-led, regeneration project, we are working with the Hafod-Morfa Copperworks, a heritage site in the Lower Swansea Valley where there is not much to see or hear. The few ruins at the site make it difficult to imagine what the site would have been like back in its heyday. Our goal at the site is to draw people together, not to view a finished piece of curated heritage, but rather, to start conversations about their memories and the significance of the site to them and to discover what they would like to see at the site in the future. The technology we are producing is about engaging with the local community and stakeholders as groups to provoke discussion. This contrasts with previous uses of mobile guides which only attempt to be tourist aids. In this article, we report on two prototype technologies we have developed to help accomplish this task. Throughout the article, we discuss how and why designing performative technologies could help encourage people to visit, socialise and communicate within the area. Our early results suggest that expressive performative technologies are good at gaining spectators' attention and encouraging an active engagement between performer and spectator.

Towards the Design of a Virtual Heritage Experience based on the World-as-Support Interaction Paradigm

“…Ideas for improvements of guided tour: The children proposed, e.g. (1) a treasure hunt activity with hints to provide a playful experience during the guided tour, (2) to explain the guided tour through pictures, (3) an activity where children could dig up the destroyed children's room and discover what was hidden under the stones, (4) to perform a drill of the bomb alarm and experience the rushing of people into the shelter. Thus, Children's proposals revealed a need for participative and hand-on activities during the guided tour.…”

“…Cultural heritage sites play a crucial role in how people understand history and culture. According to Betsworth et al [2] they have "the potential to teach us important lessons, such as where we came from and subsequently, the people it has made us today". Interactive experiences for these contexts are commonly used to complement learning concepts rather than being considered as independent learning tools [5,13,14].…”

“…The authors pointed out that almost no participants paid attention to the physical environment during the experience. Betsworth et al [2] described how, in the act of holding the screen-based device in front of the physical world, the system became a "digital divider". In other words, when using screen-based devices (e.g.…”

Evaluating Digital Cultural Heritage ‘In the Wild’

“…Following previous scholarship on place-based digital cultural heritage, we both understand heritage encounters to be embodied, and consituted of 'personal, social, cultural, and physical experienial qualiies' [8]. Paricularly, Ciolfi [8] and Fosh et al [23] emphasise the role of embodiment in experiencing a variety of cultural and natural heritage sites, while Betsworth et al [24] pay atenion to the role of spectators and bystanders in performaive digital heritage applicaions in a disused Copperworks site. In the later study, interviews and observaions showed not only that paricipant experiences were diverse, but that they were highly coningent on how paricipants responded to the tangible and emoional resources, as well as the acivity on the sites, which were not strictly scripted on the mobile applicaion.…”

Projected Fiducial Markers for Dynamic Content Display on Guided Tours

“…There are few studies that combine the use of projection devices and fiducial markers to created located information presentation. One such system is presented in [1] where the authors describe a study that took place at the National Botanic Garden of Wales. The study explored the participants' reactions to a prototype that utilised a pico-projector attached to an iPod.…”